skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google has almost no lock-in at all for their main economic engine, search.

If a notably better competitor comes along tomorrow, within a year the whole money empire could crumble. People would just go to the new place, one at a time.

Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short timeframe.

The problem with technical advantage is that when it's gone, it's gone.
I've been using for the past couple of weeks, I like it alot. The design sold me, but I care alot about UI, anyone have any fav features?
Did you read the article, or look at the pictures? They aren't simple panoramas.
Why the World Needs Superheroes
I get nothing special on hover, but I get a 503 error when i click it

503. That’s an error.

The service you requested is not available at this time.

Service error -27. That’s all we know.

[edit]- that was when signed in to google. If I open an incognito window, clicking the button brings up google doodles as expected.
The hiring clearly took place before the incident; whether the training took place before the incident is ambiguous. If it did, it was clearly ineffective. If not, then we have no evidence one way or the other as to its effectiveness.
I'm not saying they've removed specialists. I believe they still exist. But in switching to node, because client/server shares a language, they're now capable of sharing code as well. Which is what I imagine they are doing, which is why it's logical that they've merged teams. This doesn't rule out that front/back-end specialists are removed and become well-rounded rather, they're just working together more.
The last picture of the gorillas and the cell phones reminds me of Running the Numbers - An American Self-Portrait by Chris Jordan, which is one of the most amazing things I've seen for putting numbers into perspective (in this case using detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs)

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/
>it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share.

His rant doesn't touch this because that is the perceived value to individuals that facebook provides. Cannot really argue against that and I am glad people are able to use it like this. However, there is something in this "value" that bothers me and why I do not use facebook. From the facebook ad link at the beginning of his post:

"We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human, get together, open up. Even if it's a small gesture, or a grand notion -- we wanted to express that huge range of connectivity and how we interact with each other,"

The ad does not show that. It shows people doing things together. It shows real people interacting in a physical world. It shows physical, tangible, things. Not pictures of things, or short quips and a link to an article or an emoticon. The feeling the ad tries to carry across to the viewer is the exact reason that facebook is a terrible medium to "connect" in the human sense. Lets compare it to Apple's FaceTime ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k). Not only is the product in almost every scene, but the ad shows exactly how it directly integrates and impacts peoples lives. The last scene with the sign language drives home the technology empowering humans to connect in an almost surreal new way. Another example is the Kodak Carousel scene from Mad Men (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus). How facebook goes from their Timeline ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU) to "Chairs are like Facebook" is incredible to me. The commonality in all of these is capturing intiment moments between individuals. That is where the value proposition falls down with facebook. There is no sense of intimacy in the communication channel. A photo of your mom and dad probably has a different value to you than to your other facebook friends. It has very little to do with the photo itself as the photo has no intrinsic value either. It is the memories and emotions tied to it. That is the extent of it. Your mom doesn't need you to like the photo. Your friends don't need to see your comment saying your dad looks like a dork in that sweater. I argue that the passive nature and resulting noise to signal ratio makes facebook insufficient to build real human connections. For these things, not sure how facebook is better than email... it is no where close to live voice or video chat. Having a billion people on it means nothing when you only really want to communicate with 50 of them on a regular basis and only 1-4 of them at a time. Everything else on facebook is just self absorption and ego.

But I digress. His rant is really about how facebook is trying to make everything a part of its ecosystem. I can barely get older generations on email or MMS messaging let alone facebook. Trying to include facebook in every website serves no one but facebook and to what end? It definitely isn't user experience. Facebook is going the way of AOL as a ubiquitous term describing what the internet is and that is a scary thought.
These look like Fermi problems, they are supposed to check your ability to work with assumptions, and insufficient data. The answer is not important, the thought process is.
"Apple customers who want Google maps can readily switch to an Android phone."

Does the author not realize that this is patently false? Most people are on 2-year contracts, no?
When will wolfram alpha do this for me?
I think Cringley missed the subtlety of "come back with music" is a nice way of saying "your pitch sucks"
$193 in 3 months = 65/month. Since it only takes 5 mins every year, I would say ask for at least 2 years worth of payment which should be roughly $65*24 = $1560.
Do you realise that Long Island City is basically the bit of Queens that is closest to midtown Manhattan? I suspect that you're a little confused. Long Island City is close and well connected to Manhattan.

Just a clarification :).
You can leave it outside the limits - they just charge a fee for bringing it back (15€ I think.)
MindMeld
Excellent point on the ambiguity of it.
The point of such training is to make it less legally risky to fire people for being insensitive.

Looks like it was effective.
So one of the things I've been working on in my 'spare' time is a simple training computer. One of the things I have been very careful to do is document what sources of information and inspiration I'm using in that design/implementation (all pre-1992) in order to insure that should someone try to throw a patent troll lawsuit at it I would be well equipped to defend. Sad really.
I bought my first ThinkPad (the classic ThinkPad 600) in 1998. I immediately decided it was wonderful and swore I'd never use another brand of computer again.

There was a time after that when they just kept getting better and better: the A30p with a beautiful 1600x1200 IPS display, and then that same display in the slimmed-down and faster T60p.

I also bought a bunch of old beaters to use as test machines and what not: 750's, 755's, a 360, and I was so happy when I tracked down a 701c with the butterfly keyboard.

Then for a while you could get used working A30p's in good condition for $300 or so. Did I mention the 1600x1200 IPS display? :-)

I love the TrackPoint [1] and those great displays, and even better, all the machines had the same great keyboard! When other laptop manufacturers were fiddling with this layout and that, every ThinkPad had the same exact keyboard, and it was a good one too. I could move from one ThinkPad to another without thinking about it.

Then, they hired a keyboard designer.

You could see the trouble coming in this poll:

http://blog.lenovo.com/design/keyboard-layout-survey-details...

The poll itself is gone, but the comments on the blog post are still there. The poll had all sorts of layout tweaks - moving various keys around in an A-B-C-D test - just the kind of thing a keyboard designer would want to do.

Then the new keyboards started coming along. Commonly used keys were moved around, and the F1-F2 keys were jammed into a solid tight row with no gaps between the groups of four keys. These gaps (between F4-F5 and F8-F9) are what afforded easy touch typing on these keys that are so far away from the home row.

Trust me, if you're reaching for Fn+F5 (wireless settings), you don't want to hit Fn+F4 (standby) by mistake. With the old keyboards, that's never a problem. There's a nice gap between F4 and F5 and you don't have to look at the keys to hit the right one. With the new one, good luck. (Oddly enough, the ThinkPad X1 and X1 Carbon do have little gaps here even though they follow the new layout otherwise. But the other newer models, no such luck. And the X1 keyboards are not compatible with other models.)

Many die-hard ThinkPad fans hated the new keyboards, not because of the "island" design but because of these frivolous layout changes.

Lenovo's response:

http://blog.lenovo.com/products/why-you-should-give-in-to-th...

Entrepreneurs, read the comments on that post for a lesson in how to discourage your most avid supporters. :-(

Edit: this comment on that post was insightful:

> I bet the recent supposed user tests also didn't include a significant number of dedicated, old-timer ThinkPad programmers, otherwise you'd made more of an effort mentioning this in the article, and the outcome would most likely have been different. Rather, it must have consisted mainly of random people off the street who're used to cheap laptops with keyboard layouts changing with every model. So surely they can't be bothered with yet another weird layout and thus mark it as "fine".

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=love+trackpoint
"We don’t even tolerate people brining up concerns of racism here."

Wow. I assume that somewhere along the line, that guy misunderstood 'zero tolerance of racism'.
Petit Computer - BASIC programming on Nintendo DSi
They both smell of butts.
Something I've always wondered is how image-oriented languages like smalltalk handle deployment, version management, etc. How do you make a frozen, repeatable bundle? I realize that may be the wrong question, that those things are irrelevant, but if so, why are they irrelevant? What is it about those environments that compensates?
It's useful to make a distinction between the "sound" static analyses Matt Might posted about and heuristic-based, or "pragmatic" analyses.

Cousot's Analysis of Signs is sound. It can fail by returning {-,0,+}. However, when it succeeds, it does make guarantees. If it returns {0} for an integer, then it has proven that that integer will always and only have the value 0. Furthermore, if that integer can be 0, it is guaranteed the analysis will return a set containing 0.

Pragmatic analyses have no such guarantees; if a pragmatic analysis of signs returns {0}, then anything could happen. They are "pragmatic" in that their value is determined by how correlated their output is with the answer on real programs; there are no theorems to prove about them.
Yes. But, they look for another input that has the same hash and for which they also have other secret information. For example, a PGP public key with the same hash (Fingerprint) for which they have a valid private key thereby affording them a working "collision" key pair. Obviously, very difficult.

There are a wide array of attacks. Using the method just described and the existence of a hash collision to fake a signature, rather than a key pair, in some cases can be much easier. Depending upon the protocol and procedures used, it may also be possible to use a different method such as providing the true authorized signer with any content that shares a collision with something you'd like the authorized signer to sign (but that they would not normally sign). This can be especially true when the signing procedure is fully automated (For example, some CA's SSL certificate acquisition process is fully automated).

The reason that the collision is important is because many cryptosystem implementations (and humans of course) use hashes as unique identifiers of key pair material (PGP Keys & PKI certs).
Your rejection based on the rule change makes no sense. Mike very clearly agreed to a change in the rules of the game. "can I send you a [de]compressor and several compressed files whose total file size is less than the original uncompressed file and from which I can regenerate the original uncompressed file." "Sure"

Also your rejection based on the files not being compressed is not going to work. I can get around it in only a few seconds of effort:

Let's say I have a theory that gzip works more efficiently when you don't have too many 1 bits in a row. I make a script to extract all the 0xFF bytes and compress each chunk (I might have to strip headers or use a compression algorithm that's better at dealing with random data without expansion, but that's not a huge hurdle.). Is this compression somehow not good enough? It's definitely a meaningful transform of the original data, with the chunks coming out wildly differently.

In fact allowing both a decompressor and a compressed file is a bad idea in the first place. If you get a sufficiently compact language and large file you can achieve compression on any file by the original wording. Split the data between the two files, this will give you n free bits based on where you split. Then make your decompressor, as part of some process subjectively qualifying as 'decompression', incorporate these extra bits.

Mike should have simply said "a .tar with the compressed file and decompressor, which is smaller than the original file".
Everyone is trying his best to be PC, but the real takeaway is that you have to be careful not to hire some ultra-sensitive pantywaist thug who publicly cries "racist" at every shitty joke, giving your company weeks of terrible PR to clean up.

“Hey he’s dressed like Run DMC, does he know how to rap?”

Oh, the poor darling. Let's ruin a bunch of people's livelihoods over this apparently wicked comment.
The key to thing to this kind of thinking is to tie (hidden) actions to other, required actions.

It's amazing how far this can be taken.
What I hate most about "celebrating success" is that it doesn't help, it just gives people envy. Success is not the goal, it's the outcome of reaching a goal, and in order to reach it, you WILL and MUST fail many times for long periods of time. Failure is inevitable and invaluable because it helps you see what does not work. Of course everyone wants to succeed eventually, but it's only through failure that we can get there.

It's like celebrating being a good person instead of celebrating the qualities that got someone to the title of being a good person. If you celebrate the journey more people will take it. If you celebrate the outcome it doesn't help anyone, it just gives people envy.

For the longest time I didn't understand that because it went against everything my parents and society taught me. As children we are conditioned to "copy" behaviors, actions, theologies, values, and when we don't copy them from our parents correctly we are verbally punished and our behavior is looked down on. This discourages children to be "different" and associates "different, unique, new, untried" with "bad". It associates "failure" with "embarrassment" And "different, unique, new, & untried" are exactly what one needs to get ahead in life and be your own boss, build your own company, and create something new.

What I learned through all these years is that Success is the outcome of trying enough things and failing enough times to find out what doesn't work and what does. Being "afraid of failure" means to be afraid of the "Journey of trying".

Also, when you look at governments, countries, and businesses in general, failure is the default state. Things do not automatically work, they automatically fail. And you must work very hard for long periods of time and make many adjustments before you get them out of failure and into success. Even then, that success can be temporary as markets and consumer needs change quickly.

One of the things I really want to do on my blog is list all my failures, websites, product prototypes, projects. Just to encourage others to do the same.
I think we have a disagreement on semantics.

If you can provide a guarantee based on a proof, then I do not consider that a heuristic. I consider there to be two differences between proof-based analysis and heuristic-based analysis:

1. Proof-based analysis may provide guarantees. In other words, no false-positives, but false-negatives are possible. Heuristics cannot provide guarantees, only probabilities, and they can have both false-positives and false-negatives.

2. Heuristic-based analysis require data to create. For example, let's say we analyzed some code and saw:

struct thing* = alloc_thing();
process_thing(thing);
thing = alloc_thing();

A heuristic based analysis may say "The pattern of allocations and uses in this code is consistent with known memory leaks in other applications." That is, we have recognized a pattern in code that when seen elsewhere, there was a memory leak. This is a very different animal than proof-based analysis because it relies on historical data and pattern matching against it. But it may be a false-positive. In contrast, a proof-based analysis does not need to look at any other code but the one in question; it has proven what the behavior is. It could not provide a false-positive.
one way to do it is to load the entire system into the image and actually just straight up deploy the image as an executable.
Universal Cross-site scripting vulnerability in Opera browser
Meet Scott Vener, Music Man Making Myspace Cool Again (Or Trying)
Spotify’s Business Model Called ‘Unsustainable’
Math.NET Project
you sound racist
Great reason to mostly avoid those subjects as well.
Spoken like someone who hasn't had to deal with casual and/or institutional racism much.
I guess I don't understand where the line between code and data lies, then. Is there a store for variable data that is separate from the image?

EDIT: To clarify, I know that Lisp and Smalltalk have a fuzzy-to-nonexistent line between code and data. What I want to know is how you'd manage that in practice. If I'm changing an existing piece of software, I don't want to expose production users to its incomplete state, so I can't change the running production site directly. (Right?) But if I'm developing locally, or even in a staging version, I don't want to transfer my test/sample data.

Maybe a better question is, "What is a typical workflow like for modifying production software?"
If you observe carefully, Star Trek doors seem to detect intent rather than proximity. Sometimes people are just in front of them talking and as soon as they finish and want to get through, the door magically knows it needs to open.

On the other hand, when they are facing someone through the door and want to close it, they usually have to press a little button next to it.

Maybe it could be possible IRL with a face detector and looking at the direction and speed of the person.
> Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has change over in a very short timeframe.

Eh. I quit it a few years ago and honestly, no one cared. I kept up with the people I kept up with, they did the same.

it completely vanished with nary a ripple.
In other words, Facebook provides more usable and discoverable interfaces for the tasks you list. But you omitted a few tasks that are not practical at all using the tools e-mail, XMPP and IRC provide:

Passive broadcasting / timeline: Share a status update with your friends, without putting it in an inbox or otherwise forcing them to actively dismiss it. People read your update if they happen to see it, but are not obligated to.

Events: Invite people to an event and let everyone see a convenient headcount and list of all the Yes/Maybe RSVPs.

Friends of friends: Discover new connections among the people you already know—for example, that Bob and Sally are acquainted even though you've never seen them together.

Photo tagging: Label each person in a group photo in a listable, searchable way. By viewing photos others have tagged, refresh your memory of who someone is.

At current there is no integrated, open protocol that would solve the above use-cases in an even remotely adequate manner, even if everyone on earth used it. We're left with two options. Surrender control to centralized social networks like Facebook, who have solved the above problems, but only within their walled gardens. Or simply go without these benefits and opportunities.

Both choices are unacceptable to me, and long-term, I suspect most hackers will feel the same way. That's why I strongly hope for the Tent protocol, or something like it, to succeed. https://tent.io/blog/tent-basics
Beautiful. Reminds me of so many people I've seen at beaches and campgrounds out west.
Not at all - YVR is the airport.
I'm one of the people who posted on the previous thread that didn't agree with the tone/method of the original blog post. Not that it matters in the slightest what I think. However, I'm glad it turned out this way.
I found a domain search engine (that doesn't exist anymore) that let me filter domains. I wanted a 6 letter domain or shorter that was meaningful. There weren't that many options so I only had a handful to choose from. I got dixxo.com and dixxxo.com as well for $9/each. I also have hublify.com and dropclock.com.

I didn't really know what product I was building but I had those domains. It wasn't until last month were I pulled efreeme.com out and started using it... The point is get a good domain, and you'll never know when it might come up that you could use it.
Thanks for your input. Do you think the potential trademark infringement (that doesn't seem to be a major issue for any other site on the web) would affect this value at all?
General Question: What is power supply on the bicycle? Both for GPS theft recovery and for the E-unlock device? Did not see that mentioned in the post, wondering of any of the users might know?
Adafruit Learning System Raspberry Pi WebIDE
You're a coward. Now go away and stop trolling, little boy.
It is sad to see an Intel engineer misstate/misuse Moore's Observation. The actual observation was that the number of transistors you could put on a chip doubled every 18 months, not performance. For a long time more transistors meant more performance but now that isn't the case. So people put more 'cores' on to a chip to use up those transistors.

That said, the ARM threat is under estimated since the power budget is so much lower and the cost per CPU is also lower. So 10,000 ARM8 cores with SHA hardware are cheaper than 10,000 x86 cores doing the calculation in software.
Do not confuse those who comment on any particular article with the HN community as a whole.

Say what you will about the quality of any individual comment made, but you'd be making an ironic mistake to judge anyone who is part of HN based on the comments of a few ;).
Kixeye is probably hiring now, sounds like you would do well there :/
What is AIO?
it is worth noting that they let the 4 employees in question go, that shows that they are taking the issue seriously now, IMO anyway
Little Bird Lands $1M
I think the language you use is very interesting. "A website that I own" makes it seem like it's a commodity and not necessarily a product which you've put lots of blood, sweat and tears into building. From your description, it sounds like that's the case. So really its just a domain sale. Not sure what the domain is, so I can't be certain how much value that has in and of itself.

That said, the advertising profits alone do give the site value. I'd counter the offer at $600 and point out that, if current trends continue, the site will pay for itself in the next year. But there's definitely a lot of risk involved, so it's worth selling and taking the money now. I would at least.

Unless you want the domain for something, sell it. It's hard to rely on ad revenue. Being able to pocket a few hundred dollars right now is probably a good option.